


when you talk to the sun

by piggy09



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-02
Updated: 2016-07-02
Packaged: 2018-07-19 16:44:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,229
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7369765
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Here is Rachel, at the end of the world.</p><p>(A study of Rachel in the time after the Season 4 finale.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	when you talk to the sun

**Author's Note:**

> [warnings: nonconsensual medical procedures, worms in children's mouths, sex with dubious consent, gore, child death]
> 
>  
> 
> [The research of Dr. Dmitri Volkov.](https://66.media.tumblr.com/e1af5a194779eb7c8346a3799893177c/tumblr_o9pcfuTGkp1r1y5klo1_1280.png)

When Rachel reaches the mainland again, she goes back to her apartment. Not the one she’s currently staying in, with Ira, with Ferdinand panting around every corner – the apartment that was hers when she was a woman Sarah Manning was still viciously trying to defeat. When she opens the door, old air sighs out of the room; it smells like wilted flowers. She makes her slow limping way through the door. Someone brought in orchids, after she…left, and by now they’ve all died. Good lord. Who was stupid enough to bring flowers here? Didn’t they know? Couldn’t they see?

But she doesn’t care, not really – she passes them, unseeing. Sure enough: her laptop is still there. It turns on obediently enough when she powers it up, springs to purring life under her silver fingertips. Her passwords still work. Her email inbox is filled with memos, subject lines sprouting urgent flowers: FINAL, SHUTDOWN, CEASE. There’s a series of timid and then increasingly frantic emails from Martin; she closes every single one of them. She – quite frankly – does not give a damn. That isn’t what she’s here for.

The DYAD has everything backed up now, all of it on a cloud somewhere. This means she’s still able to access it from her laptop – even now, even with the DYAD’s Rachel Duncan dead and gone. Rachel Duncan – belonging only to herself, if you believe that joke – navigates through the files to the locked file labeled HELSINKI, 2001. She types in the password. _Iphigenia_. All of those things we sacrifice.

The file springs open and Rachel ignores the horrible awkward DYAD-attempts at obituaries, memorials carved out of data and sterile blood. Instead she opens the files of Dr. Dmitri Volkov – no, not the medical tests, the laughably stupid attempts to cure girls by making them sicker. Not those files.

There’s an image. Rachel opens it and looks at it in silence before grabbing her cane in a white-knuckled fist and going to the kitchen to pour herself a glass of wine. The bottles are exactly where she left them. Good.

She comes back to the laptop. The entire screen is filled with the image: a room of fetuses in jars. Four hundred of them, her mother had said. Four hundred attempts. She was so young, then. Seventeen. She hadn’t known. Rachel had been giving birth over and over again, every single time a stillbirth, and she hadn’t had even the slightest idea.

She drains the glass and looks curiously at the way it’s shaking. That would be her hand, then. Well.

She puts the glass down gently on the tabletop and looks up to the security camera nestled between the ceiling and the wall. The red light on it is off. This is the first time Rachel has ever seen that light off.

Good.

 _Good_.

* * *

Four hundred times. They’d taken from her, over and over again, without asking. And then Susan had given Charlotte to her like a gift. A present, neatly wrapped in ribbons Rachel recognized from the ends of her own pigtails – twenty years ago. As if she should have been grateful. As if she should have _thanked_ Susan, for giving Rachel back some twisted-up mockery of what she’d taken in the first place.

She had left Susan in the house – unlocked the door, but only after destroying the phone lines and ruining the boat. She took the only helicopter away from the island. Let her mother climb up those same stairs Rachel had been forced to climb. Let her realize, at the top, that no one cared how much it hurt. How much it tore at her. She should stumble desperately around the house, she should realize that no one is coming for her. No one is coming for her, because no one _cares_. She might die in that house. Or maybe she’ll live there. Maybe she’ll live forever.

Here is the simple and beautiful truth of it: Rachel doesn’t have to care. She locked Susan somewhere in the dark, all the way down, and although the real Susan may climb the stairs the Susan in her mind will never make it out of the basement. Sarah down there bleeding, Susan down there bleeding. Rachel’s monsters groaning and weeping. At the top of the stairs Rachel stands alone in the blank white rooms of her mind. She is very secure in this: none of them will make it out of the dark.

* * *

She isn’t there when they first succeed. She is somewhere else, watching snow fall outside the window. But she gets the call: human cloning is officially restarted. There’s a child growing in one of Aldous Leekie’s artificial wombs, and it will never have a name. Nobody will ever give a damn if it smiles.

The snow, the snow, falling outside of the windowpane. The silence on the other end of the line. They are waiting for her to say _I’d like to see it_. She is waiting, also, in a way – she’s curious, to see if she wants this.

In the end she decides that she doesn’t. There’s no use in getting attached. They build these machines just to watch them fall apart – they don’t build them to teach them to sing. There might be a small part of Rachel that looked at the subject and thought the word _daughter_. That would be irresponsible of her, wouldn’t it? That would be unforgivable. To grow overly-attached to your own subject, to the point it in any way clouds your judgment: unforgivable.

So Rachel hangs up the phone without another word, and stares at the way it lies in her palm. It’s not until another handful of moments pass that she realizes she’s waiting for something, and it takes a moment after that to realize she’s waiting to be angry. Furious. Anger leads to action; anger is fuel. She’s waiting for it.

But it doesn’t come. She’s just hollow. Maybe that’s the joke of it: that they took from her, and took, and took, and now there’s nothing left. But that’s a ridiculous story. She’s not going to believe in it.

* * *

Rachel dreams: a hospital room, full of bassinets. Every child in every crib with the same set of eyes. Sarah’s standing outside of the room, hands splayed against the glass. She can’t touch them. She can’t reach them at all. Rachel is behind her, but she can see Sarah’s face reflected in the glass: she’s weeping, like a fool. Rachel steps up behind her and snakes her hands around Sarah’s waist; she splays her hands above Sarah’s hipbones. Below the kidneys. Beneath her hands: something besides the kidneys.

 _See_ , she whispers into Sarah’s ear. _See_. One of the children opens its mouth and screams, high and wailing and cracked. There’s a worm in its mouth. It’s enormous. It’s bigger than it would be, realistically, but then again this is a dream. The point of the worm is the fear. That fear that scrapes the edge of the child’s wail, sends all the other children screaming. Their mouths erupt with worms. All of them are seeded with the bots, waiting for the harvest.

Rachel digs her fingers tight into the skin above Sarah’s ovaries. Sarah doesn’t say a word. She just weeps. Rachel has won. Rachel has everything she wanted, and Sarah is weeping, and Rachel has won.

She wakes up. No part of the dream stops being true.

* * *

In a country where clones aren’t people but corporations are, Rachel closes the curtains of her hotel room’s windows and pins a man to a bed like pinning a butterfly. She wraps her hands around his neck. She presses down, presses her mouth a little higher on the column of his throat and mouths words against his jugular. _I’m not a person_ , she says without speaking. He’s inside her, he’s filling her, she’s choking the life from him. I’m not a person. Every single piece of me is owned. I’m not a person, I’m not a person, I’m not a person.

She presses her mouth to his, less like kissing and more like devouring. He pants breaths into her open mouth. They pass the fact back and forth between their teeth: Rachel is not a person. But if she isn’t a person, and underneath her this man is whining _please_ and _god_ and _please_ – what does that make him? What does that make her? If personhood is not something she can reach, and underneath her a man is saying _god_ …what does that make her?

She doesn’t orgasm anymore. That’s something else that’s been taken from her. The man underneath her manages his own sad gasp and she wraps her hands a little tighter, digs her thumb into his windpipe. She could kill him right now. There is not a single record saying she’s here – technically, she doesn’t exist. Rachel Duncan died in a plane crash. Or maybe Rachel Duncan died in a fire. Or maybe Rachel Duncan died on the floor of a medical room with a pencil in her eye. She can never quite keep track.

The man splutters, wheezes, bats ineffectually at her arms. She does not let go. _I didn’t kill my mother_ , she thinks. _I didn’t kill Sarah. But I could kill you, and it would be easy_.

But what would it matter?

She lets him go, stands up, smoothes down the front of her slip. “Go,” she says. He does.

* * *

Her shoes click against the sterile white tiles of the lab; her cane does the same. There is a riddle, somewhere – what goes on four legs at dawn, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening? The answer to that riddle is: her.

Ahead of her some technician is hurrying, scuttling in circles around her like a bug; _the results are in, Miss Duncan, we have excellent news for you, Miss Duncan, the subject is ready if you would like to see, Miss Duncan—_

If you would like to see, Miss Duncan. Has there ever been a sentence quite as curdled with irony.

In the room, a child is lying on a table. It has Sarah’s eyes. Possibly it has the tilt of Ira’s nose, but Rachel doesn’t focus on that – she is focused entirely on the fact that it has Sarah’s eyes. She steps closer, closer, closer. Fervent whispers of statistics rise behind her, like prayer. Here on the table: an offering of sorts. Iphigenia. Altars, altars.

She brushes fingers along the child’s face, and it watches her with wide eyes. She wonders if anyone will teach it to write. She wonders if it will ever speak.

Suddenly, viper-quick, Rachel digs a thumb into the child’s eye socket. Something crushes under the pad of her thumb. Something breaks, irreversibly. You can’t repair damage like that. You simply can’t.

She takes a step back, pulls her thumb out of the child’s eye socket with a horrible wet sucking sound. The laboratory is silent, except for the high siren-sound of the child starting to wail. It’s terrified, presumably. Even animals know how to feel fear.

“Fix it,” Rachel says to the first scientist that manages to meet her eyes. Then she turns on her heel, and leaves.

* * *

See? See? See?

* * *

She comes back to the lab a month later. The child is lying on the table. Its eyes are still wide when it watches her. Its eyes are just as wide as they were before. Maybe even wider. Maybe she’s taught it something; maybe before her, this child never knew how to be afraid.

“Good,” she says. She takes a step closer. Have they taught the bots how to repair tissue that quickly? Could they have sewn her eye back together? Could this technology have made her whole?

Does it matter?

She reaches for the child’s face again, and this time it flinches. Its face crumples, and – it starts crying, suddenly and instinctively. The sound grates. Rachel drops her hand back to the head of her cane, clenches her fingers so tightly that the cane creaks like old wood.

“Next time,” she says, “I expect work like this to be done within two weeks.” The room is silent. No one questions her, when she says _next time_. They’re learning. Oh. They’re all learning.

No one follows her, when Rachel leaves the laboratory. Good.

 _Good_.

* * *

Time passes. Rachel does not return to the laboratory, to any of the laboratories; she receives progress reports via email, reads them in beautiful glittering apartments in cities whose names she does not have to know. They’ve created a factory line. Hundreds of children born every month, mouths sewn tight with Evie Cho’s technology. This is Rachel’s legacy: child-corpses sliced open neatly with scalpels, so that everyone can learn what’s inside. She sends all these children to the guillotine so that no one will ever again reach inside of _her_.

Because she can, she makes the cure the second priority. Before any of the men and women on the board can slink in with their sharp teeth and sharper agendas: Rachel will have what is hers. Immortality, of a sort. Whatever noun means the opposite of decay.

It takes them a handful of months. She wonders, idly, if that time could have been enough to save Charlotte. Has she already died, out there in the woods of Rachel’s monster-island? Did she live on roots and berries? Did she ever get the chance to pick up a paintbrush again?

In the great glass house of her mind Rachel reaches out and takes Charlotte’s hand. She leads her down to the basement. _I don’t want to go_ , Charlotte says. _I’m not a monster_.

But her mouth is soaked with blood, and Rachel knows best. She puts her in the room – where Sarah is forever and ever crawling across the floor with a knife in her leg, and Rachel’s mother sits tied to a wheelchair and never stops bleeding. They’ll tell Charlotte stories. They’ll braid her hair. They’ll take care of her.

Outside of Rachel’s mind she is holding a needle. She slides it into her vein, depresses it. The cure slithers into her veins. She is never going to die.

* * *

On the subject of immortality: P.T. Westmorland comes to the house, but only once. He looks at her. Rachel feels a sharp squirming sickness in her stomach, one that says in a child’s voice: _be proud of me_. She has spent years and ruthless years trying to kill that voice, but it never stays down; it screamed loud enough to pull a knife into her hand, plunge a knife into Susan’s belly. _Be proud of me be proud of me notice me see me love me_. _Love me_ , god. She does not open her mouth. She smiles with closed lips.

If he takes a liking to her – who knows. She could live forever. She could have everything in the entire world. And she’d _deserve_ it, because she knows what to do with that power better than he does. She wouldn’t waste her time living in a hut in the woods, surrounded by the desperate screaming of swans. What are swans, anyways. Flocks of stupid birds with too many teeth in their mouths. No, Rachel would go to the house on the island and tear it all the way to the ground and then – start over. Build something new. Live there forever, Rachel in a castle with all the monsters firmly outside. Rachel alone. Rachel with everything, everything she’s ever wanted. All of it. Every single thing.

* * *

The children who have survived are walking, now. Some of them totter in drunken steps. Some of them are stable. In an entirely separate laboratory, on an entirely separate continent, Rachel watches through a one-way mirror as the children stumble around the room. She wonders if she was ever that clumsy. She could look. There are probably notes, somewhere.

In her father’s messy handwriting: the word _subject_ , crossed out. The word _daughter_. There are some things that are simply unforgivable.

A scientist is standing next to her, radiating awkwardness, desperately awaiting her approval. Desperately. One word from Rachel could make or break this project. She considers, idly, lifting a perfect manicured finger and pointing to the window. _I want that one_. She would take it, the child, it would be hers. She could do whatever she’d like to it. She could love it. She could kill it. No one would take notes. All of the DYAD’s security cameras have been turned off, permanently – it’s the end of an era.

No. Not even that.

The era is long gone. They won’t even tell stories about it. Aldous was so desperate to exist in history books, and his legacy will be devoured by Brightborn. Evie was so desperate to be a revolutionary, and her legacy will be devoured by the very people she tried so desperately to convince of her merit.

Rachel doesn’t want anything. Rachel certainly doesn’t want _that_.

She does not reach out to the glass. She does not single out any one of these identical children, these time bombs. They all have Sarah’s eyes, but only one of Sarah’s eyes will ever see them. Rachel does not reach. She just turns around and leaves again. She does not look back.

* * *

She does not look back.

She does not, even one time, look back.

* * *

Here is Rachel, at the end of the world. A different man in her bed every day, if she wants it. Wine from a hundred years ago, if she wants it. The entire world delivered to her on a platter the same color as her fingertips – and there’s an irony in there, somewhere, there’s a story to be told. Once upon a time there was a woman who had everything that she wanted. All she had to do was want it.

Here is Rachel standing in front of the mirror. Her makeup goes on the exact same way it has for seventeen years. She doesn’t see swans anymore. There are no swans left to see. When she looks into the mirror, the only thing that Rachel can see is herself. She takes up the entire frame. She is – in the end – all there is.

She puts on her lipstick. She walks, on her own, to her meeting with the board. Under the flickering neon halo-light of the fixture above the table she tells them. The project was an unmitigated success. We’ve done it.

They asked her to name it, you know. The project.

She’d said: it doesn’t need a name. If you name something, it can become a story. It’s a new age. We don’t need to read about women wrestling with swans. Why pretend that any of these children will ever be anything? Why should we tell them that they’re going to grow up and be something?

Why should we tell them that they’re going to grow up at all?

Around the table the board is clapping, perfunctory rounds of applause. Rachel smiles politely. She waits for it to be over.

* * *

Rachel dreams: she is standing in front of the door to the house on the island. Sarah opens it. Rachel looks behind her, to the couch inside. She can see Susan. She can see Charlotte.

 _Come in,_ Sarah says, _we’ve been waiting for you._ She opens the door.

**Author's Note:**

> It gets old when you talk to the sun  
> In a tongue understood by no one  
> Can it be that I hear what he's saying?  
> Is there a reason why I'm still awake?
> 
> And he says, "I've got you written  
> In a black book by the railroad track  
> You see, I know your fate."  
> And I say, "you've got to listen  
> I'm a songbird with a brand new track  
> You underestimate."
> 
> I'll give you something to believe in  
> Burn up the basement full of demons  
> Realize you're a slave to your mind, break free  
> Now give me something to believe in
> 
> Just give me--  
> Just give me something to believe in  
> \--"Something To Believe In," Young the Giant
> 
> I actually wrote this whole fic and heard this song on the radio immediately afterwards and freeeaked out because it fits so well. I don't know if "he" and "I" are Westmorland and Rachel or Rachel and the others, in this instance. _Is_ Rachel God? Up to you.
> 
> Anyways! Thanks for reading! Please kudos + comment if you enjoyed. :)


End file.
